The company has received praise from singers and administrators alike for its unique program, which currently contracts singers for two years at a time.

When OperaDelaware partnered with boxing champion Dave Tiberi and some of his boot camp students in November 2025, it transformed a program of famous opera scenes into OperaDEathmatch, a series of artistic bouts. Attendees cheered for their favorite singers, who were also clad in boxing gloves and robes, and for their favorite fighters during some inter-aria sparring bouts.

The singers taking part in this musical battle royale were tenor Dane Suarez, soprano Toni Marie Palmertree, baritone Gerard Moon, and soprano Emily Margevich, and all four of them are participants in OperaDelaware’s pathbreaking company artist program. Now in its second season, this program has put all four singers on full-time salaries ($50,000), with benefits that include health insurance and a housing stipend. The salaries cover their singing work in mainstage, second-stage, and community performances, as well as administrative responsibilities in such areas as development and marketing. The singers are free, indeed encouraged, to develop their careers by accepting performing assignments elsewhere.

While companies around the country like Pacific Opera Project and the Sacramento Philharmonic & Opera have active singers on staff in part-time and full-time roles, OperaDelaware’s program seems unique among professional opera companies for its broad-based approach to supporting artists, praised by company administrators and the singers alike.

Brendan Cooke, OperaDelaware’s general director, started incubating the idea during the pandemic when the performing arts shut down and freelance opera singers were suddenly without income. “We had to cancel our 75th anniversary season a few weeks before the artists were due to arrive, and our contract had no mechanism to pay them for their preparation time,” says Cooke, who will leave the company in the summer. “That didn’t sit well with us.”

Conversations with artists, plus a 2023 “Cost of Being a Singer” survey from the Soloist Collective for Emerging Singers showing that 95% of professional opera singers must do other kinds of work to make ends meet, formed the outlines of the program. “We started to imagine what it would look like if we involved artists earlier in the artistic process and found ways to capitalize on the multifaceted entrepreneurial skill sets that are required for having a career in this business,” says Cooke, who believes the model could be adapted at other companies, particularly smaller ones with bare-bones staffs.

Grant funding from the Longwood Foundation and others put the program in place in 2024. The company’s board is also fully behind the concept, and it will remain a priority as part of the company’s strategic plan once Cooke departs.

Model Debut

For its inaugural run, OperaDelaware decided to hire singers they knew in order to get honest feedback during this pilot stage. (Suarez, who is married to Kerriann Otaño, the company’s vice president of engagement, says he served as a guinea pig for the model.) Each was asked what area of administration interested them. Suarez, who had already built up a flourishing business in graphic design and social media management, took on assignments in those areas; Palmertree, who had interacted with donors during her time as an Adler Fellow at San Francisco Opera, chose development. Training included a 10-session course from arts administrator Michael Mael. The singers are supervised by department heads and take on projects that would otherwise have to be contracted out or left undone by the company’s five-person professional staff. As Otaño puts it, “These are all additive to existing positions. The work can continue when the singers are on the road; it can just continue faster when they are here with us.

“It’s also on-the-job training for them, so they can become the workforce and the leaders of opera tomorrow,” Otaño continues. “These artists are valued for more than just their singing talent.”

Initially, OperaDelaware planned to have a new group of singers each season but quickly realized the value of having the four original artists embedded in the Wilmington community. Their contract is currently for two years, and OperaDelaware is working on securing funding for a third. When the singers expressed interest in artistic planning, the company gave them an opportunity to program the company’s second-stage offerings, “with guardrails,” as Cooke puts it. The company artists helped transform what had been a series of “greatest hits” programs in the company’s studio space. After the November OperaDEathmatch program, they produced a double bill of the comic opera Service Provider and a 60-minute adaptation of Pagliacci in January. That production can be booked for off-site performances in restaurants and on the company’s mobile stage. Palmertree also made her directing debut with this program.

Suarez has taken the lead in devising the second-stage projects and sits on the artistic planning committee of the board, giving his views about the company’s two mainstage productions. He says it’s been a marked change from his typical experiences as a singer. “Artists are left out of conversation a lot of the time, particularly when it comes to productions,” he says. “You show up, find out what time period the opera is set in and what you’re wearing. To have those conversations ahead of time, to be able to bake that into your preparation, opened my eyes. I’ve never had a more fulfilling time as an artist in my career.” Suarez now envisions a post-singing career in artistic planning down the line.

In addition to the opportunity to gain administrative and directing experience, Palmertree is also grateful to have a salary and benefits. “I’m a cancer survivor, so it’s incredibly important to have good health insurance that covers scans,” she says. What is more, she got a “big break” opportunity — a March 2026 performance of the title role of Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera for her house stage debut, a last-minute add-on to her cover contract. For many freelance singers, the contraction of the opera business has meant fewer gigs, and an even harder time making a living. Without the OperaDelaware salary, she says, “there was a real possibility that I might have taken a break from singing and not gotten this opportunity at the Met.” Palmertree now has some substantial future engagements in the pipeline.

Double Casting

A handful of other opera companies have working artists on their administrative staffs in both part-time and full-time roles. Josh Shaw, artistic director of Pacific Opera Project, hired contralto Emily Geller, who had performed with the company, to coordinate POP’s social media on a 10-hour-a-week salary. She is based in New York, and while she does come to California, most of her work is remote, and easily accomplished even if she is on a singing job.

Soprano Rena Harms Simpson serves as Sacramento Philharmonic & Opera’s full-time director of development and special projects while still pursuing her singing career. Simpson, who had taken a full-time job at UC Davis when COVID hit, contacted Giuliano Kornberg, the company’s CEO, about singing work in 2023. A few weeks later, Kornberg hired her when the soprano for the company’s upcoming Pagliacci lost her voice. At a post-performance coffee meeting, he persuaded her to take on part-time development work for the company. “She was really fun, really nice, with a great personality,” he says. “A good fundraiser has to want to get to know people and have an aptitude to build relationships. She had all that.” After a year, she went full-time.

Simpson has continued singing, both in her company’s productions and elsewhere. Kornberg, she says, has been flexible and encouraging about outside engagements. Her dual identity has some challenges, including her Special Projects role, in which she uses her singing background to advise Kornberg on casting, which can be “a little awkward,” she says. “I definitely feel I’m at a crossroads. I’m a successful fundraiser, but to transition completely would make me very sad.”

Many singers have done so. Both Cooke and Otaño are former singers. So is Jonathan Blalock, who has been working in development at The Atlanta Opera since 2019 and was recently promoted to director of advancement revenue. Blalock continued singing in some concerts and recordings but made the intentional and difficult decision to give up singing once he took his first full-time administrative job in 2017 with Opera Saratoga. “I was past 30, and I had had a period of six months when 12 strong holds or contracts fell through for various reasons,” Blalock recalls. “People said, ‘You’re working, getting excellent reviews,’ but reviews don’t pay for groceries, health insurance, paid time off, and retirement. I had to take a really hard look at what I wanted from life, what was most meaningful to me, and what I wanted for the next chapter. It was a tough decision, but once I made it, I had absolutely no regrets.”

Like most singers, Blalock had innumerable “side hustles” during his singing days — jobs like catering, temp work, waiting tables, assisting with an independent record label, babysitting, and pet sitting. Historically, singers have kept their side jobs quiet, because taking other kinds of work implied you were not really serious about singing, or had failed. That tension may have lessened in recent years, as the struggle for survival has become even greater and as companies have become more accepting of singers needing to maintain other jobs during a production cycle. “I thought I would really miss it, but I don’t, because I’m grateful to find the same kind of fulfilment with the work we are doing here,” Blalock says.

For Sacramento and POP, the double role has worked out very well. In Sacramento, both Kornberg and Simpson have been flexible — Simpson skipped some auditions when the company had a busy period, but Kornberg says that they will be able to work out the longer leaves necessary for her possible upcoming assignments. He calls her “a tremendous asset.” POP’s Shapiro notes, however, that while singers know the business and art form well, he wonders how long those pursuing active singing careers will be able to commit to a long-term administrative role and whether “they can truly be happy not performing,” he says.

The singer’s career stage seems to be a key element in how such hybrid roles work. Simpson, who worked in Europe earlier in her career, is no longer looking for months-long stints overseas, which could make maintaining even a remote administrative role prohibitively difficult. And as for OperaDelaware’s company artists, the model is built for turnover. “Our hope is that their careers will take off, and we won’t be able to keep them,” Cooke says. At that point, ideally, other young singers would take their places.

A Solutions ‘Gold Mine’

Opera companies that employ singers in non-vocal jobs recognize how valuable their hustle and their skills can be in developing the company profile. Otaño says, “OperaDelaware is so much more visible in the community, and able to partner with other nonprofits, schools, and community organizations that we didn’t have the staff support to do before.” That community work, plus the workforce development aspect of the company artist model, has aroused the interest of new corporate and foundation funders, as well as individual donors. “Our patrons know our artists; they have become friends,” Cooke says. “The additional events like OperaDEathmatch have brought in new sponsors.”

For Cooke, having artists become an integral part of the community is a win for everyone. “I imagine them running for the school board and having every high school musical in town look fabulous,” he says. Plus, he says that he hopes other singers who take part in the program will recognize Wilmington as a prime location from which to base a singing career.

It has been life-changing for the artists, Suarez says. “The best thing is feeling trusted by and invested in by the company.” And Palmertree adds, “It’s remarkable how much has changed in the company over the last year — the programming, the relationship with donors, and the fan base are all different. I hope that other companies realize that they are sitting on a gold mine of solutions from artists who want to help make this industry last for a long time. We are in the trenches. Ask us. We want to help.” ■ 

The Multihyphenate Artist Directory

As a service to members, OPERA America has compiled a list of artists with administrative and other skills in the Multihyphenate Artist Directory. The directory includes 170 individual artist members looking to showcase their parallel career skills to potential hirers.